The Distant Hours (9 page)

Another thing I feel compelled to mention about Percy: for an octogenarian with a cane she set a cracking pace. We took in the billiard room, the ballroom, the conservatory, then swept on downstairs into the servants’ hall; marched though the butler’s pantry, the glass pantry, the scullery, before arriving finally at the kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from hooks along the walls, a stout Aga rusted beside a sagging range, a family of empty ceramic pots stood chest to chest on the tiles. At the centre, an enormous pine table balanced on pregnant ankles, its top scored by centuries of knives, flour salting the wounds. The air was cool and stale and it seemed to me that the servants’ rooms, even more than those upstairs, bore the pallor of abandonment, They were disused limbs of a great Victorian engine that had fallen victim to changing times and ground to a final halt.

I wasn’t the only one to register the increased gloom, the weight of decline. ‘Diffi cult to believe, but this place used to hum,’ said Percy Blythe, running her finger along the table’s crenelation. ‘My grandmother had a staff of over forty servants. Forty. One forgets how the house once gleamed.’

The floor was littered with small brown pellets I took at first for dirt but recognized, by their particular crunch underfoot, as mouse droppings. I made a mental note to refuse cake if it was offered.

‘Even when we were children, there were twenty or so servants inside and a team of fifteen gardeners keeping the grounds in order. The Great War ended that: they all enlisted, every last one. Most young men did.’

‘And none came back?’

‘Two. Two made it home, but they weren’t the men they’d been before they went. There were none returned in quite the same shape they’d left. We kept them on, of course – to do otherwise would have been unthinkable – but they didn’t last long.’

Whether she referred specifically to the length of their employment or, more generally, to their lives, I wasn’t sure, and she didn’t leave me pause to enquire.

‘We muddled along after that, employing temporary staff where possible, but by the second war one couldn’t have found a gardener for love nor money. What sort of a young man would be content to occupy himself tending pleasure gardens when there was a war to be fought? Not the sort we cared to employ. Household help was just as scarce. We were all of us busy with other things.’ She was standing very still, leaning on the head of her cane, and the skin of her cheeks slackened as her thoughts wandered.

I cleared my throat, spoke gently. ‘What about now? Do you have any help these days?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She waved a hand dismissively, her attention returning from wherever it had been. ‘Such as it is. We’ve a retainer who comes in once a week to help with the cooking and cleaning, and one of the local farmers keeps the fences standing. There’s a young fellow, too, Mrs Bird’s nephew from the village, who mows the lawn and attempts to keep the weeds in check. He does an adequate job, though a strong work ethic seems to be a thing of the past.’ She smiled briefly. ‘The rest of the time we’re left to our own devices.’

I returned her smile as she gestured towards the narrow service staircase and said, ‘You mentioned that you’re a bibliophile?’

‘My mother says I was born with a book in my hand.’

‘I expect, then, that you’ll be wanting to see our library.’

I remembered reading that fire had consumed the Milderhurst library, the same fire that had killed the twins’ mother, so although I’m not sure what I expected to see behind the black door at the end of the sombre corridor, I do know that a well-stocked library was not it. That, however, is precisely what lay before me when I followed Percy Blythe through the doorway. Shelves spanned all four walls, floor to ceiling, and although it was shadowy inside – the windows were cloaked by thick, draping curtains that brushed the ground – I could see they were lined with very old books, the sort with marbled end papers, gold-dipped edges, and black cloth binding. My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.

Percy Blythe noticed the focus of my attention and seemed to read my mind. ‘Replacements, of course,’ she said. ‘Most of the original Blythe family library went up in flames. There was very little salvageable; those that weren’t burned were tortured by smoke and water.’

‘All those books,’ I said, the notion a physical pain.

‘Quite. My father took it very badly indeed. He dedicated much of his later life to resurrecting the collection. Letters flew hither and yon. Rare-book dealers were our most frequent callers; visitors weren’t otherwise encouraged. Daddy never used this room, though, not after Mother.’

It might have been merely the product of an overactive imagination, but as she spoke I became certain that I could smell old fire, seeping from beneath the new walls, the fresh paint, issuing from deep within the original mortar. There was a noise, too, that I couldn’t place; a tapping sound, unremarkable under normal circumstances but noteworthy in this strange and silent house. I glanced at Percy, who had wandered to stand behind a leather chair with deep-set buttons, but if she heard it at all, she didn’t show it. ‘My father was a great one for letters,’ she said, gazing fixedly at a writing desk within a nook by the window. ‘My sister, Saffy, too.’

‘Not you?’

A tight smile. ‘I’ve written very few in my life and those only when absolutely necessary.’

Her answer struck me as unusual and perhaps it showed on my face, for she went on to explain.

‘The written word was never my métier. In a family of writers it seemed as well to recognize one’s shortcomings. Lesser attempts were not celebrated. Father and his two surviving brothers used to exchange great essays when we were young, and he would read them aloud in the evenings. He expected amusement and exercised no restraint in passing judgement on those who failed to meet his standards. He was devastated by the invention of the telephone. Blamed it for many of the world’s ills.’

The tapping came again, louder this time, suggestive of movement. A little like the wind sneaking through cracks, blowing grit along surfaces, only heavier somehow. And, I felt certain, coming from above.

I scanned the ceiling, the dull electric light hanging from a greying rose, a lightning-bolt fissure in the plaster. It struck me then that the noise I heard might well be the only warning we were to get that the ceiling’s collapse was forthcoming. ‘That noise—’

‘Oh, you mustn’t mind that,’ said Percy Blythe, waving a thin hand. ‘That’s just the caretakers, playing in the veins.’

I suspect I looked confused; I certainly felt it.

‘They’re the best-kept secret in a house as old as this one.’

‘The caretakers?’

‘The veins.’ She frowned, looking up, followed the line of the cornice as if tracing the progress of something I couldn’t see. When she spoke again, her voice was slightly changed. A hairline crack had appeared in her composure, and for a moment I felt that I could see and hear her more clearly. ‘In a cupboard in a room at the very top of the castle there lies a secret doorway. Behind the doorway is the entrance to an entire scheme of hidden passages. It’s possible to crawl along them, room to room, attic to vault, just like a little mouse. If one goes quietly enough, it’s possible to hear all manner of whispered things; to get lost inside if one isn’t careful. They’re the castle’s veins.’

I shivered, overcome by a sudden and pressing image of the castle as a giant, crouching creature. A dark and nameless beast, holding its breath; the big, old toad of a fairy tale, waiting to trick a maiden into kissing him. I was thinking of the Mud Man, of course, the Stygian, slippery figure emerging from the lake to claim the girl in the attic window.

‘When we were girls, Saffy and I liked to play pretend. We imagined that a family of previous owners inhabited the passages and refused to move on. We called them the caretakers, and whenever we heard a noise we couldn’t explain, we knew it must be them.’

‘Really?’ Barely a whisper.

She laughed at the expression on my face, a strangely humourless
ack-ack
that stopped as suddenly as it had started. ‘Oh, but they weren’t
real
. Certainly not. Those noises you hear are mice. Lord knows we’ve enough of them.’ A twitch at the corner of her eye as she considered me. ‘I wonder. Would you like to see the cupboard in the nursery that holds the secret door?’

I believe I actually squeaked. ‘I’d love to.’

‘Come along then. It’s quite a climb.’

She was not exaggerating. The staircase turned in upon itself, doubling back again and again, narrowing and darkening with each flight. Just when I thought I was going to be plunged into a state of utter blindness, Percy Blythe flicked a switch and a bare light bulb fired dully, swinging on a cord suspended from the ceiling high above. I could see then that at some point in the past a rail had been attached to the wall to assist with the final steep assault. Sometime in the 1950s, I guessed; the metal cylinder had a dull utility feel about it. Whomever and whenever, I saluted. The stairs were perilously worn, all the more so now that I could see them, and it was a relief to have something onto which I could clutch. Less happily, the light meant I could also see the webs. No one had been up those stairs in a long time and the castle spiders had noticed.

‘Our nurse used to carry a tallow candle when she took us to bed at night,’ said Percy, starting up the final flight. ‘The glow would glance against the stones as we went and she’d sing that song about oranges and lemons. You know it, I’m sure:
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
.’

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head
: yes, I knew it. A grey beard brushed my shoulder, sparking a wave of affection for my plain little shoebox bedroom at Mum and Dad’s. No webs there: just Mum’s bi-weekly dusting schedule and the reassuring whiff of disinfectant.

‘There was no electricity in the house back then. Not until the mid-thirties, and then only half voltage. Father couldn’t abide all those wires. He was terrified of fire, and understandably so considering what happened to Mother.

‘He devised a series of drills after that. He’d ring a bell, down on the lawn, and time us on his old stopwatch. Shouting all the while that the place was about to go up like a mighty pyre.’ She laughed, that glass-cutting
ack-ack
, then stopped again suddenly when she reached the top step. ‘Well,’ she said, holding the key in the lock a moment before turning it. ‘Shall we?’

She pushed open the door and I almost fell backwards, bowled over by the flood of light that came rolling towards me. I blinked and squinted, gradually regaining my vision as the room’s contrasting shapes sharpened into view.

After the journey to reach it, the attic itself might have seemed an anticlimax. It was very plain, with little of the Victorian nursery about it. Indeed, unlike the rest of the house, in which rooms had been preserved as if the return of their inhabitants was imminent, the nursery was eerily empty. It had the look of a room that had been scrubbed, whitewashed even. There was no carpet, and the twin iron beds wore no covers, jutting out from the far wall each side of a disused fireplace. There were no curtains, either, which accounted for the brightness, and the single set of shelves beneath one of the windows was naked of books and toys.

A single set of shelves beneath an attic window.

I needed nothing more to make me thrill. I could almost see the young girl from the
Mud Man
’s prologue, woken in the night and drawn to the window; climbing quietly onto the top shelf and gazing out across her family’s estate, dreaming of the adventures she would one day have, utterly unaware of the horror that was about to claim her.

‘This attic housed generation after generation of Blythe family children,’ said Percy Blythe, her eyes making a slow sweep of the room. ‘Centuries of peas in a pod.’

She made no mention of the room’s bare state or its place in literary history and I didn’t press her. Since the moment she’d turned the key and led me in, her spirits seemed to have sunk. I wasn’t sure whether it was the nursery itself that was having such an enervating effect, or whether the increased light of the stark room simply allowed me to see her age writ clearly within the lines of her face. Whatever the case, it seemed important to follow her lead. ‘Forgive me,’ she said finally. ‘I haven’t been upstairs in a time. Everything seems . . . smaller than I remember.’

That I understood. It was strange enough for me to lie down on my childhood bed and find that my feet had grown past the end, to look sideways and see the unfaded rectangle of wallpaper where Blondie had once been pasted and remember my nightly worship of Debbie Harry. I could only imagine the dissonance for someone standing in a bedroom they’d outgrown some eighty years before. ‘All three of you slept up here as children?’

‘Not all of us, no. Not Juniper; not until later.’ Percy’s mouth contorted a little, as if she’d tasted something bitter. ‘Her mother had one of the rooms off her own chamber converted to a nursery instead. She was young, unfamiliar with the way things were done. It wasn’t her fault.’

It seemed an odd choice of words and I wasn’t sure that I understood.

‘Tradition in the house was that children were permitted to move downstairs to a single room when they turned thirteen, and although Saffy and I felt very important when our time finally came I must confess to missing the attic room. Saffy and I were used to sharing.’